Results from today’s league event at Nine Wells are now available on the Results page. Thanks to Pat Macleod for his organising & planning, and all the other club members for helping at the event.
Forestry England Activity Survey
Forestry England have asked us to ask you to complete a short survey about the day’s activities in the forest. It’s part of their broader plan to encourage activities generally in the forest, and it would be very helpful for us as well, I suspect, if we can demonstrate how much we use the forest, and how important it is to us to have as wide access as possible.
You find the survey itself at https://www.forestryengland.uk/active-forests-survey, and more about their Get Active programme at https://www.forestryengland.uk/getting-active
Organiser’s Comments
First of all thanks everyone for coming, on what towards the end of the day proved a very warm one, though slightly less so under the trees. Huge thanks also to the trusty band of helpers who made things go with their normal smooth informality, to Berry Hill Rugby Club, and to Broadstones Catering, for hosting us, on a very successful day for Northern Hemisphere rugby! The cafe and match viewing were most welcome after a hot run.
As to the courses, winning times were substantially over what they should have been for broadly middle distance courses, suggesting that they were too long, and some controls in the mid green, on Blue and Brown, proved particularly tricky for most people. It is perhaps too easy for a planner, visiting a site several times over the course of a couple of months of planning, to assume that if you can walk straight to the control without bothering with compass etc, everyone else will find it at least relatively straightforward; clearly not the case today with controls 194 and 221! The ‘Fight’ zone by 194 should have been made more distinct, as a guide to finding a close in attack point for the control. As it was it was somewhat indistinct as to where the fight really was. Generally I tried to avoid the worst of the undergrowth, but to get any real use from the area you have to use the mid green bits, which are slow but at least largely devoid of undergrowth, once you actually get into them. It’ll be interesting to see how people fare on New Year’s Day 2023, when we will be using Ninewells again.